Earth Journalism Network: Building Network and Media Capacity to Cover Environmental Issues
Context and Issue:
Our planet’s environmental future will be decided in the developing world. These countries are home to four-fifths of the world’s population, the fastest growing economies, and the richest remaining pockets of biodiversity. They will determine how drastically our climate will change, how many species become extinct, and to what extent our food chain becomes contaminated.
Local media can play a critical role in influencing how governments and societies balance growth with sustainability. With the help of good training, local media can serve as an important institution supporting the effective protection of the environment and natural resources and their capacity to provide for human needs.
The approach of the Internews Earth Journalism Network (EJN) is to help establish global connections between environmental journalists in countries and regions where they don’t exist, and build their capacity where they do, through training workshops, support for production and distribution, dispersing small grants and fellowships, research, and the development of curricula and briefing materials. Over the last 6 years, 1,500 journalists from dozens of countries have already been trained and have produced numerous stories during the project’s activities.
Project's activities:
- Training of staff of media, NGOs, and academia: Journalism Fellowships to the UN Climate Summit in Durban COP17, Journalism Fellowships to Rio 2012, EC Fisheries Workshop, Country Programs in China and Indonesia
- Financial support for media and NGOs to generate more and better media coverage of climate change and biodiversity issues, their inter-relationship and the possible policy responses to them
- Network-building activities resulting in enhanced links among and between three target communities of media, civil society, and academia: Climate Communications Day at the UN Climate Summit in Durban, Pan-Amazon Conference, Third Pole Project – Brahmaputra Conference
Participants and Beneficiaries:
The beneficiaries are principally individual journalists. However, this project also has an impact on:
- Managers and editors who can benefit from Training of Trainers work and adapt tools and techniques to their newsrooms and communities
- Networks of professional journalists and environmental journalists
- Governments, who are held to a greater degree of accountability and transparency by virtue of EJN members’ investigative and reporting work
- The international development and environmental advocacy communities, with whom can be shared the results of the assessments and evaluations facilitated by this capacity-building initiative
Outcomes:
By improving their knowledge and their reporting skills, EJN journalists generate debate about the central role of media and communications in formulating inclusive policies on climate change that include the perspectives of the general public and key stakeholders such as scientists, business, consumers, policy makers and marginalised communities. This project supports the networking of journalists, scientists and policy makers in ways that generate ongoing and improved coverage of national and global climate change issues and international negotiations. The network fosters greater collaboration and resource sharing with other international providers of environmental media support services. This project also assists EJN member organisations in developing their in-country national climate media programmes through collaborative planning meetings.
Climate change communication can be difficult, because the related science and negotiations are very complex. It takes skill to make these issues understandable to the general public while ensuring their accuracy.
Katharine Eaton, Programme Coordinator of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network
Covering climate change is an especially challenging task for us as journalists. It's a complex, changing and to some extent unwelcome subject area. At Climate Communications Day, we were able to share experiences, stories, new approaches and best practices. It was content-rich and a highly useful networking forum.
Heather King, Reporter at greenbiz.com
